Joining a real-time collaborative editing session

When you join a collaborative editing session you will see each contributor's changes as soon as they are made, and you don't need to wait for others to finish editing before you contribute your edits. This effective real-time collaboration produces documents that reflect your team's best effort.

Start collaboration

You can join an existing collaborative editing session on a document by clicking on the  button.

Participants in collaboration

The upper right corner shows the current number of active participants in the editing session.

If you click on the drop-down, you can easily the list of all collaborators.

Collaborate with others

Co-authoring Activity

Word

The color cursors show the highlighted names of co-editors as well as what they are working on.

Cell

In a spreadsheet, the highlighted name of the co-editor and a colored cell border indicates the cell they are working on.

Show

When two or more persons are editing a presentation, user icons with different colors are shown next to a slide thumbnail to indicate the particular slide they are working on.

Note on Limitations:

Word

The Undo menu might be unavailable when multiple co-editors are trying to undo changes.

The Merge Cells menu is unavailable while collaborating.

Cell

Collaboration is at the cell level and not individual text within cells.

If one of the co-editors deletes a spreadsheet, a notification will alert others and editing will be blocked.

Show

Cursors of co-editors are not shown while they are editing text within a textbox. Instead, the name of co-editor and color border highlights the textbox that others are working on.